Illegal Video Game Downloads Increase By 20%

Apparently the mentality of download-first and (maybe or maybe not) buy-later is spreading worse than a venereal disease at a celebrity retirement home. A new report from the BBC suggests that illegal video game downloading has increased by 20%. According to the study the top five games of 2010 (including Call of Duty: Black Ops) have been downloaded more than one million times.

According to Electronic Theatre, the new research data comes courtesy of the data analysis firm, Envisional. Apparently industry Execs are worried that this frame of thinking will lead the newer generation of gamers to think that it’s “cool to download games for free”.

I don’t know where they’ve been for the last 20 years but before you could get games from Torrents using Google there were places like Snap.com and Altavista.com where you would type in a little something-something old-school pirates called “Warez”. With about 30 minutes of navigating through Rick-Rolling porn advertisements and misleading links, you could find any game out there on a Warez site for free.

I’m pretty sure that 20% increase in digital video game piracy is probably because of the ease-of-use presented for today’s generation of gamers, especially with stuff like BitTorrent and Usenet groups.

Andy Payne, chairman of the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment had a few comments to spare in favor of corporate pandering, saying…

“You can be playing that game every single day for a year… Look at FIFA, Modern Warfare, Black Ops, those games people are playing all the time. That’s great value.
“[Some] 200, 250 people sat in a studio for two years building the latest Modern Warfare 3,” ... “This costs real money.”

Ahahahaha, hahaha….”This costs real money”? Hahaha…ahaha. Wow, what a great laugh. Just goes to show how little this guy knows anything about games. Anytime someone uses Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as an example of “time” and “effort” put into developing a video game it really is telling that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

A game running on an ancient engine with a few patches and tweaks to the actual graphics and new maps is not “Great value” it’s an insult to gamers and consumers because it’s basically $60 DLC. Games like that should be sold for $15-$20 just like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Vietnam. Payne’s comments are obviously formed in support of the corporatist agenda, and it is exactly why a lot of people pirate, even though it isn’t right.

I think, so far, Good Old Games still has the best solution to confronting piracy and I think the industry will definitely be watching to see how they handle the issue by treating piracy as competition as opposed to an enemy. But so long as there are companies like Activision selling old-assets in new games and charging top dollar for them, there will be pirates galore.